By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories

Single-payer health care is, according to numerous surveys, supported by a majority of Americans.i Few public policies are inspiring more activism and advocacy in the United States right now than single-payer health care at the national and state levels.ii Organizations are holding marches across major city bridges. Think tanks and foundations and labor unions are generating studies. Doctors, read more

Oct. 29, 2004
It’s a well known fact that the media sucks. Or is that merely a widely held opinion? I’d like to argue that it is a distinction that makes no difference, that opinion-free facts are the mythical creation of insecure epistemologists, that all the recent laments over the media’s becoming too opinionated are understandable but confused, that the corporate media has a powerful interest in the myth of non-opinion because it allows the expression of corporate read more

Nov. 3, 2004
Dear World,
Please be on the lookout for more bombs, debts, and global warming. It’s what we in the United States like to call “letting the healing begin.”

I know, I know, you thought there might be hope for us. You thought we might be ready to cross the bridge to the 18th century and stop letting religious bigotry run our lives. Even you British supposed that we might care about having killed 100,000 Muslims. Sorry to disillusion you on that one. We found it more read more

Nov. 5, 2004
Already the strategists are advising the Democrats to go to church more, hunt more, and become more like the Republicans. This strategy has, however, been pushed just about as far as it will go, and in a quarter century of trying has worked only for Bill Clinton, and then only with a lot of help from Ross Perot and a number of lucky breaks.

With over 40 percent of the country still not interested in voting despite massive Get-Out-the-Vote efforts, record turnouts, and endless lines read more

November 22, 2004
Those desperate enough to consider moving to Canada to escape a nation headed by George W. Bush may want to consider an easier option that could deny Bush’s Republican successor the presidency: moving to Iowa.

We spent upwards of $300 million trying to elect John Kerry ($241 million through the campaign, another $80 million through other organizations). We turned out every anti-Bush voter we could find. But there weren’t enough pro-Kerry voters to put Kerry over the read more

November 22, 2004
Part of the ILCA Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories
Bush’s success in reducing the value of the minimum wage in each of the past four years has wreaked havoc with the lives of millions of working Americans, but it does not exist as a media story.

The minimum wage loses value as the cost of living rises. Were the government to take action to partially correct for this loss in value, the media would cover that story, but would refer to it as “raising read more

December 8, 2004
Five hundred people who care about the future of the labor movement gathered at the City University of New York on December 2nd and 3rd to discuss what that future should look like.

There were some rank and file members in the crowd, but mostly it was made up of those who work for or write about labor. Perhaps the only points of universal agreement among the speakers and participants of the “Labor at the Crossroads” conference hosted by the Queens College Labor Resource read more

Media Outlets Refuse Union Advertising
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories
By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator, http://ILCAonline.org

Major corporate media outlets often reject advertising from labor unions. This means that the same outlets that will not cover labor for free, in many cases will not even sell working people 60 seconds of the public’s airwaves for hard-earned money.

Even people well aware of the media’s failings in covering labor issues read more

December 20, 2004

By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories

The AFL-CIO will be 50 years old in 2005. Its leaders have sat down and met with every U.S. President during those 50 years, except one, George W. Bush.

The compassionate conservative will not talk to the representatives of organized workers. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney made this point in a speech on Labor Day of 2003, in which he called Bush’s refusal to meet “a read more

By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator
Part of the ILCA’s Building Labor Media series

The Problems We Face

Two major problems face the United States that in combination seriously impede any large-scale attempts to better the lives of working people.

The first is the ongoing decline of the labor movement, which is shrinking our organized force of political activism. The second is the increasing failure of the corporate media to serve as a source of honest and useful information for citizens. read more